Appalachian History

My neighbor across the creek is already up and busy with his saw and hammer, despite it being Sunday, despite his having worked in the mines all the other six days of the week, often in water shoe-mouth deep, as he tells me, and in spite of there not being a plank requiring sawing or a nail needing driven.

He must be doing something, just as I, propped up here by pillows on my four-post walnut bed, itself a creation of Jethro Amburgey, the dulcimer maker. I find I've written seven pages in a notebook --- extraneous matter, hardly any page belonging in subject to any other, pages looking toward books or manuscripts partially written, or only projected to a number I could not possibly complete given my age and biological life span.

The lady who once asked me, "Do you do your own writing?" and to whom I replied, "No, I have seven dwarves," has lately inquired, "Where do you get your ideas?" For me ideas are hanging from limbs like pears, from fences like gourds. They rise up like birds from cover. They spring out of reports in the Troublesome Creek Times, from a remark in a country store, a happening.

From childhood I've been a reader, when there was anything to read, and I suppose I've read an average of three hours a day for half a century. Reading jaunts with mountain climbers in the Himalayas, the South Pacific, the American Civil War, World War I, the mysteries of Mayan civilization to name a few tangents, and the entire corpus of many an author. Curiousity like an itch that needs scratching.

The question is often asked: "Who influenced you to write?" Certainly it wasn't handed down in the family, and I can't think of an author I wish to emulate although I have admired the works of many. I was already scribbling before the great books came to hand. As an English observer of Appalachian folk in Harlan County, Kentucky, said, "Not knowing the right way to do things they did things their way." I did encounter the novels of Thomas Hardy during college days and the fact that I've always written about the common man may have been sparked by him.

The only class I ever cut was when I was deep in Far From the Madding Crowd and could not put the book down. The most memorable book read in college, and in French, was Alphonse Daudet's Le Petit Chose. I must grant some credit to a decade of issues of the Atlantic I came upon during the late 1920s. Otto Jespersen's The Philosophy of Grammar directed me toward "living language" as opposed to the formal.

It took time, my own time, to figure out the King of England is a myth, and all that implies --- the myths we live by, county lines, state lines, imaginary acts made actual by acceptance. I learned an apple is a modified leaf. My self-education proceeded from such facts. I am more an autodidact than a classroom scholar.

"How did you escape the stereotype 'hillbilly' writing?" -- a frequent question. That is, the stereotypical mountaineer and his dialectical speech as rendered by several authors of fiction in the past. I was hardly aware of them, didn't have access to their books. My experience was with the folks themselves.

As for handling dialect in my fictions and Notebooks, the way folk actually talk, well, now, dialect of any sort on a printed page always bothered me. Peculiar spellings can't account for the tone of voice, body language, the intent behind the statement. My aim is to invoke speech. To expect the true sound of it to happen in the reader's head. Aberrant spelling rarely accomplishes it. I trust to preserve the "voice" of the speaker.

I answered a set of down-to-earth questions at Carmus Combs' store the other day. A fellow inquired, "How many years have you lived amongst us?"
"This year makes forty-six."
"You're the last 'possum up the tree. Everybody your age when you come here are dead. Hain't that so?"
"I thought they'd live forever."
"What's your notion about dying?"
"Death is as natural as sleep," I said, quoting Benjamin Franklin. "We will arise refreshed in the morning."

My neighbor is still hammering and sawing. He has apparently decided on something to build -- a doghouse, a chicken coop, perhaps a playpen for his children. He will not halt until it is accomplished. It is his act of creation.


from "Autobiography of James Still," November 2003, Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series; vol. 17, Gale Research
online at http://faculty.colostate-pueblo.edu/sandy.hudock/jssection5.html

A native of Alabama, author James Still (1906-2001) spent most of his life in the Hindman Settlement of Knott County, KY. In addition to his writing, Still worked as a farmer, librarian and teacher. Winner of many literary awards, including two Guggenheim fellowships, Still published novels, short stories and poems which reflected his passionate feelings for the Kentucky mountains.

He was at work in the field. The sweat ran in trickles down his back and cascaded from his eyebrows into his eyes. The world was still and bright and fiery in the blaze of a July noon. He rested between the plow handles behind the mare. Sweat traced little rivers down the legs of the mare and dripped into the damp new-plowed ground between the corn rows.

The blades of the corn waved a little at the height of the mare’s back, they moved a little to the wind that came through them, diluted by each row of corn as it crossed the field. The wind was as active as a young pup in the sedge at the field’s edge. By the time it reached him it was like the warm and fetid breath of a dying animal.

As if it were the appointed time for her to come he looked up and saw Old Nance, his mother’s friend, hurrying toward him from the road. She came with her old ambling gait toward him down a corn row. He began to unhitch the traces. It seemed that he would faint from the heat and lie on the cool earth where the plow had turned up the dampness that dwelt below the surface of the soil.

He would escape the news bearer from the road. Old Nance, Old Nance who had been with his mother lying sick in her room. But he took the mare by the bridle and met her on the way.

From "Better a Dinner of Herbs" by Byron Herbert Reece

Byron Herbert Reece was born in 1917 at the foot of Blood Mountain in North Georgia. In 1935 he was admitted to Young Harris College, about 18 miles from his home, but had to leave to help out on the farm. When admitted he had already had some success publishing poetry in national publications. He attended sporadically from 1935 until 1940, but failed to graduate because of his refusal to take either mathematics or French.

He returned to the farm and wrote more poetry with increasing success in publication. In late 1943 Dutton agreed to publish a volume of poetry titled "The Ballad of the Bones." By January 1946, the book was in its third printing and the mountain farmer found himself in increasing demand as an author. From 1946 until 1954 he published 4 volumes of poetry and 2 novels.

Byron Herbert Reece's health began to fail and with it went much of his desire to write. The farm that was so central to him when he was younger became a burden, and he became ill with the tuberculosis that plagued his parents.

He entered a sanitorium in 1954 to control the TB, creating additional financial and emotional hardships. He relied on Guggenheim Fellowships and other grants to writers to cover his expenses rather than farming. He turned to teaching as well, spending terms at Emory, UCLA and finally returning to Young Harris College, too ill to continue to support himself by farming.

On June 3, 1958, with his final papers graded and neatly stacked and Mozart’s Piano Sonata in D playing on the phonograph, Reece shot himself in the diseased lung. He was not yet 41 years old.


source: http://library.yhc.edu/WebReece/Biography.html



Byron+Herbert+Reece appalachian+authors appalachian+literature appalachia appalachian+history history+of+appalachia

Appalachian writer James Still (1906-2001) moved to Kentucky after he was grown, and stayed, finally living in Hindman but keeping his original cabin, located between the waters of Wolfpen Creek and Dead Mare Branch, on Little Carr Creek, where he wrote most of his books, poems, and articles.

For 40 years Still gathered sayings from the local people, which he almost did not allow to be published--- he said it is hard to show in writings "changing inflections on one syllable to give [a sentence] two radically different endings."

Finally he did allow them to be published. His comments from the preface may give us some idea why:

"The first notebook entry was recorded some forty five years ago. Most of the participants are dead. Save for their gravestones, this is the only record for some that they lived and laughed and wept and had opinions like the rest of us. I have long tried to speak for them. Here they are speaking for themselves."

"I don't want or expect Appalachian speech to be like any other. It has its own individuality, its own syntax. To be unlettered is not necessarily to be unintelligent. It's a rare day when I'm out and about that I fail to hear something linguistically interesting."

There are 23 Wolfpen notebooks, 6x4 inches wire hinged.

"I can't name the exact year I started jotting down things they said in notebooks. I did it only for my own eyes. You might say they were written to inform stories and poems to come, yet I never thumbed through looking for an idea or a quotation. The purpose of the notebooks was to cover every facet of life in my community as well as all of the county and the counties adjoining.

"The period covered is roughly 1931 to 1965. The setting-down, I mean. I did come to believe they might in future be of interest to folklorists and social historians."

From "The Wolfpen Notebooks," by James Still---

"I want everybody to stop calling me 'Little Old Nasty Thing.'" Judy Gibson (age 4)

"These shoes I’m wearing were so tight when I first bought them I had to wear them a while before I could put them on." Willie Stewart

"If you see some pore little underly children, give to'em, do for'em." Martha Burns

"I paid Huck Francis a dime to see his picture show. Huh. It wasn’t nothing but shadows on the wall." Uncle George Childers

"My Daddy, when he died, I couldn’t hardly give him up. We used to hunt together and fish together and work in the fields together. My brothers, they went to school and became doctors and teachers and made something of themselves. I didn’t know what an education was. Now my brothers are shut up in schoolhouses and offices while I’m out here in the sun where I want to be." Okla Thornsberry

"Yeah, bless your soul, sure as Sunday morning. I'm scared to death of dying. We all dread that stinking death." Frank Hicks

"Do you remember the little Bosley girl in last year's first grade? Had long yellow hair, never smiled. Well, she died last summer. She started bleeding and nobody could stop it. There was no funeral and no casket. They just wrapped her in a quilt and buried her." Edith Orick

"Death is not a strange thing amongst the people." Preacher 'Tater Bill' Smith

"Some years back when I was the nurse at the Knott County Health Office I accompanied Dr. John Wes Duke in his visits to schools and assisted him in inoculating students against typhoid fever. I recall one school up in the head of a long hollow where he said everybody was akin to everybody else. When we had finished he spoke to them, 'Children, I have something to talk to you about. All of you look like a bunch of dried apples. Your stock is running out. Now here is my advice. When you grow up, and get into your head to go sparking, don't go up the creek, and don't go down the creek, go over the mountain.'" Sylvia Auxier


sources: www.kentuckystewarts.com/RowanCounty/JamesStillAppalachianwriterdies.htm
The Wolfpen Notebooks: A Record of Appalachian Life, by James Still, University Press of Kentucky, 1991



James+Still The+Wolfpen+Notebooks Hindman+KY appalachian+authors appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

“I don’t know anything else. You see, I was born in North Georgia, in Dalton, the town that has figured in my books as ‘Darley,’” explained novelist Will N. Harben to a reporter in a 1905 interview. “So that while I am not one of the people about whom I write—for there is the sharpest line drawn there between the townspeople and the true countrymen still, my childhood and most of my life was spent amid such scenes as I have attempted to portray. Those people and the customs and conditions of their lives are as real to me as your own family life is to you. I cannot help writing about them, because I am thinking of them all the time.

“I get more and more out of it the further I go. And the deeper I go into the lives of these simple people the more I find to wonder at and admire and the deeper I want to go. It is an absorbing study, and my thoughts are so much bound up in it that my life is passed not so much in New York as in North Georgia. You have no idea of the depth of emotion of which these people are capable. You might know them a long time and never guess at the passion slumbering deep down in their souls until some chance occasion revealed to you the storm of feeling that had been sleeping concealed from all the world.

“They are a taciturn people, little given to demonstration, making light alike of their sufferings and their pleasures, but feeling with the full force of an ardent Southern temperament all the time. And their pride, especially their family pride – it is astounding. They are a clannish people, and you would be amazed to find the social distinctions which they observe among themselves. In their way these distinctions are far more fixed and more potent than those of the outside world. They have much ambition, but it is often asleep---lulled into content by the easy life that has been followed by generation after generation. Of course, in the towns this is not so true, and once the ambition of one of these North Georgians is aroused it is a mighty force.

“Yes, we have plenty of moonshiners, and among them are some of the best people there. But you cannot convince those people that they are doing any wrong. They really believe they have a perfect right to make whisky if they wish to, not only a moral right, but a legal right. You see, their sense of justice is absolute, and they believe they are fully within their rights as citizens. They are good people, too; kind, hospitable, and generous. I know them, because I have dealt with them.

“A keen sense of humor is one of their chief characteristics. It is the shrewd humor in these characters that make them so lovable. A group of North Georgians never comes together without this trait becoming apparent. Their conversations overflow with a canny mirth that is irresistible.

“[Abner Daniel] is a type only, a very common type in North Georgia. You can meet possible Abner Daniels sitting around on benches and cracker boxes all through this region. I have listened to the conversation of such men by the hour.”

Will Harben (1858-1919) was one of the most popular novelists in America during the first two decades of the twentieth century. In his thirty books and numerous short stories Harben portrays the mountaineers of his native North Georgia with authenticity and color, though his reputation today suffers from his use of a sentimental romanticism demanded by readers of his day.

“Abner Daniel (1902) made a wide appeal, North as well as South, and really laid the foundation stone of Mr. Harben’s reputation as a delineator of character,” commented critic Annie Booth McKinney in the Library of Southern Literature. “Crude, whimsical, sarcastic, yet good-natured, droll, witty, human, Abner Daniel stands quite apart, and it unlikely that his creator will ever surpass this creation. No one can read carefully any of his stories and fail to be impressed by their underlying sincerity, or fail to rejoice in the crisp humor that seems to be as much a part of old Abner and Pole Baker as the blue is of the sky.”


Sources: North Georgia’s Quaint Folk as a Novelist’s Type, Vivian M Moses, NY Times, August 13, 1905, http://snipurl.com/31fos [query_nytimes_com]
http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-1233
Library of Southern Literature By Edwin Anderson Alderman, Joel Chandler Harris, Charles William Kent, 1909, the Martin & Hoyt Company


Dalton North+Georgia Will+N.+Darden appalachian+authors appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

I was beginning to get a bit worried about Good 'Lige, since I hadn't seen him for some three weeks. It was with a feeling of relief when I knocked at his door last Sunday to hear his cheery voice call to me to enter.

He was sitting before the fire, reading his copy of the weekly newspaper, and he had a pot of ginger stew simmering in the coals on the hearth where a couple of hickory logs were blazing.

"Sit and help yourself," he urged hospitably, nodding toward some cups and saucers on a nearby table.

While we were talking, I glanced about the room at the magazine cover-pages with which he had papered the walls. Over the fireplace, resting on a pair of deer's antlers, lay a gun that caught and held my attention. It appeared to be a muzzle-loading, double-barreled weapon, with one barrel directly over the other. I arose and took the gun down to examine it more closely.

"That’s old Hide-an'-Taller," explained Good 'Lige, "the best gun ever seen in the Apern country. I got her thut'y-forty years ago from one of the Eversoles when he was scoutin' in that French-Eversole war they had down in Kaintucky."

"Hide-and-Tallow?" I queried bewilderedly.

"Yeah, we used to have shootin' matches for beeves," said Good 'Lige, lighting the cigar I gave him. "Beeves wa'nt worth much then, an' the first choice was allus the hide and taller, because they was worth the most. I allers won with that rifle-gun there.

"She’s a double-barr'l," he continued, taking the gun and caressing it. "Ye see the top barr'l is for a single ball an' the bottom barr'l is for shot. She shore has been a meat-gun. If it wa'nt so muddy out thar' I'd show ye how she shoots. I reckon she’s got the longest range ever seen—around her anyhow."

From Tales of the Tall Timbers, a weekly column in The Dickensonian [Clintwood, VA] written by Herbert M. Sutherland, the paper's owner/editor.

As editor of Dickenson County's local county weekly, Herbert M. Sutherland was looked on by the mountaineers as almost one of their own. He was the boy they had seen around town in his teens; the boy who had fought in France in 1918 and come home honorably discharged. After being hospitalized at Walter Reed Hospital for a period of time in Washington, DC, he enrolled in the School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York, where he received a B.A. in Literature in 1921. He worked for the New York Globe, and after it ceased publication he worked for the New York Times.

In 1924 his health failed and he returned to Dickenson County to recuperate. There he spent his time hunting, fishing and writing. During the 1930's, Sutherland became interested in local politics, and was elected four times to the Virginia Assembly.

In 1939 he acquired the Dickenson County Weekly and named it The Dickensonian. His weekly column "Tales of the Tall Timbers" was read and enjoyed all over the country, and by servicemen all over the world during the 1940's and 1950's. This column included stories, using fictitious names, told to him by area friends and associates, whom he fondly referred to as 'The Liars Club.' His tall tales were published after his death in 1967 in a volume called "Tales from the Devil's Apron."

Sources: American Folk Tales and Songs by Richard Chase, Joshua Tolford, Courier Dover Publications 1971
HISTORICAL SKETCHES OF SOUTHWEST VIRGINIA PUBLICATION 13-1979, 'Mountain Scribes' by Bonnie S. Ball
www.jsfbooks.com/bookdetails.asp?ProductID=720


appalachia appalachian+authors appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history Dickenson+County++VA Herbert+M.+Sutherland Tales+of+the+Tall+Timbers The+Dickensonian

On April 2, 1931 Horace Kephart was killed in an automobile accident near Ela, NC along with fellow author Fiswoode Tarelton. Kephart (1862-1931) was a travel writer and librarian who published hundreds of articles during his lifetime, but became especially renowned for his classic works 'Our Southern Highlanders' and 'Camping and Woodcraft.'

In one of Poe's minor tales, written in 1845, there is a vague allusion to wild mountains in western Virginia "tenanted by fierce and uncouth races of men." This, so far as I know, was the first reference in literature to our Southern mountaineers, and it stood as their only characterization until Miss Murfree ("Charles Egbert Craddock") began her stories of the Cumberland hills.

Opening of 'Our Southern Highlanders,' by Horace Kephart

In 'Our Southern Highlanders,' published in 1913 and expanded in 1922, Kephart argued that the rest of America knew almost nothing of a people set apart "from all other folks by dialect, by customs, by character, by self-conscious isolation," who because of the terrain of the land still lived in the eighteenth century. His book strove to change that. Kephart saw firsthand the impact of modernized communication and transportation on Appalachia during his lifetime, and by book’s end predicted that the region was on the verge of an economic revolution which would change everything.

Trained as a librarian, Kephart achieved national recognition during his years as director of the Mercantile Library in St. Louis, Missouri, from 1890 to 1903. While living in what was already one of the largest cities in the nation, Kephart began indulging in outdoor life through camping and hunting trips. As his passion for the outdoors increased, Kephart began to write articles about the subject topics. Kephart developed 10 years of experience writing about these excursions centered on Arkansas and Missouri.

These works are similar in substance and tone to those he would later publish about western North Carolina’s mountains and people. Eventually he succumbed to what he later called 'nervous exhaustion' and concluded that urban life was a major contributor to his problems. He left his career as a librarian in St. Louis and, after a brief respite and period of personal reflection at the home of his father in Ohio, soon decided to move to western North Carolina.

In 1904, at the age of 42, Kephart arrived in western North Carolina to begin his life anew. He chose a simple lifestyle and nature-as-healer approach. At the same time, he immersed himself in his new natural environment and took an immediate interest in the history and culture of the people.

Kephart, who was personally modest and rarely sought the limelight, nevertheless used his abilities and reputation on behalf of the movement to create a Great Smoky Mountains National Park. As a unique and recognized personification concerning the cultural and natural studies on the Great Smokies region, he was influential in convincing individuals on both the local and national levels of the need for such a park.

Kephart's arguments on behalf of a park were thoughtful and pragmatic as well as appealing to the love and appreciation of nature. Acknowledging that the Great Smoky Mountains contributed to his mental and physical recovery after 1904 and describing the economic potential of a national park, he campaigned vigorously to preserve the last major stands of forests in the East.

It had become apparent in his lifetime that a national park would be a reality. In February 1931 the U.S. Geological Board recognized Kephart's contribution by naming a peak within the park Mount Kephart, an honor previously only bestowed posthumously. Shortly before his death, Kephart had represented Swain County in Washington, D.C., when state park officials from North Carolina and Tennessee transferred the titles of the lands purchased by them to be used for the park over to the United States government.

Kephart's major works have remained in print and articles appear on a routine basis about his contributions to camping, regional history, and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Sources: http://library.wcu.edu/digitalcoll/kephart/horacekephart/biography.htm
smokymountainnews.com/issues/06_04/06_30_04/mtn_voices.html


Horace+Kephart Our+Southern+Highlanders Great+Smoky+Mountains+National+Park appalachian+authors appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

"Am I to understand that our good brother was married four times?"

"You shore air," said Len. "There lays four of as good wives as a man ever had. Them tombstones don’t tell no lies. They’s all ’fore my time, savin’ Aunt Lindy, his last ’un, but I’ve hearn enough to know what they wuz."

"But four? Isn’t it a little unusual?"

"Well, maybe it is, but Uncle Nathe wuzn’t no hand to set at home by hissef."

from Highland Annals
New York: Scribners, 1925

Poet, playwright and novelist Olive Tilford Dargan, widely considered to be one of the best authors ever to come out of the Appalachian South, was born Jan. 11, 1869 in Litchfield, KY. Dargan’s writing focused on women and working class issues of the region. Few have surpassed her in description of mountain beauty or in her sympathy for the less fortunate. She was especially interested in fighting the stereotypes of mountain people and culture that were propagated in local color writings, especially Earley Muriel Sheppard's Cabins in the Laurel.

A feminist and a socialist, Dargan provided one of the few strong southern female voices to the proletarian fiction of the 1930s. As an active participant in that movement, she wrote a series of radical feminist/socialist novels on the Gastonia mill strikes. Her 1932 radical feminist novel, Call Home the Heart, written under the pen name Fielding Burke, was reprinted by the Feminist Press in 1983.

Olive Tilford Dargan began her literary career in 1904 with the publication of poetic dramas and lyric poetry. While in college at Radcliffe, she had gone on a camping trip to the mountains of North Carolina and had vowed to have a home there one day, a dream that was fulfilled in 1906 when she and husband Pegram bought Horizon Farm on the Nantahala River in Swain County. Having dependable tenants allowed them to travel extensively, and Olive spent much of her time in England. There she completed a non-fiction work, The Welsh Pony, followed by her first book of mountain poetry, Path Flower and Other Verses.

When Pegram drowned off the coast of Cuba in 1915, Dargan returned to the North Carolina mountains and spent most of her time there until the farmhouse burned in 1923. During this period, she published three distinctly different collections of poetry. The Cycle’s Rim (1916), a collection of sonnets dedicated to her late husband, won a $500 prize from the Southern Society of New York. Lute and Furrow (1922) contained lyrical verse inspired by her love for the mountains, as does The Spotted Hawk (1958), which won the Roanoke-Chowan Poetry Award.

After moving to Asheville, NC in 1925 she wrote the collection of short stories many consider her best work, Highland Annals, and three novels under Fielding Burke, as well as a final book of verse and a last short story collection. Highland Annals was extensively revised and reissued as From My Highest Hill in 1941. The second edition included for the first time fifty striking illustrations by photographer Bayard Wootten.



sources: www.ncwriters.org/services/lhof/inductees/odargan.htm
www.library.appstate.edu/appcoll/research_aids/ssavell.html
poetry.poetryx.com/poets/220/bio/
www.english.eku.edu/SERVICES/KYLIT/dargan.htm


Bayard+Wootten Olive+Tilford+Dargan appalachian+authors appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+culture appalachian+mountains+history